OBSERVER

OBSERVER; The Ivy Hayseed

By Russell Baker

Published: June 15, 1988

George Bush ought to be as electable as the next man in this year of the indifferent electorate, but it does him no good to pretend he isn't George Bush. Whenever he tries it, he looks silly and embarrasses people who want to see him look good.

To get elected, he must be who he is, because when he pretends to be somebody else his efforts are so contrived, so amateurish that you see right through him, and it makes you wince with embarrassment for him and feel uneasy about him and wonder why isn't he at peace with himself?

Who is he really? He is George Bush, Yankee son of rich and elegant investment banker Prescott Bush who became a Senator from Connecticut. He is George Bush of Andover and Yale. He is George Bush, who knows what a debutante ball is and doesn't know that Iowa farmers don't. He is top drawer, upper crust, one of the nobs. He summers in Maine and knows about sailing. He says ''Golly'' and ''Gee'' and ''Gosh,'' and maybe even ''Darn!'' and ''Heck!'' and says them naturally because he was brought up to believe that gentlemen don't use vile language.

The notion has evidently got into his head that these high-class markings will harm him with the voters, for he seems intent on becoming the Lon Chaney of politics, the Man of a Thousand Faces. He is constantly trying to pass himself off as Battling Bush, or as Old-Shoe George, or as Archie Bunker's soul mate, Archie Bush.

These appearances in false face are hard to explain, for he must know that wealth and the high-born style have always been catnip to American voters. Hence the political triumphs of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay, the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, the Kennedys of Hyannis Port, the Rockefellers of Fifth Avenue and Pocantico Hills.

His all-time phoniest moment to date occurred in the 1984 campaign the morning after his TV debate with Geraldine Ferraro, when he appeared wearing a hard hat in a gang of urban construction workers. On the television news that evening the nation was treated to film of Archie Bush telling a bunch of blue-collar guys he had ''kicked a little ass last night.''

The construction men did not look embarrassed, but only because their instinctive gentleman's code forbade scowling at a Vice President while the cameras were working. You knew they must have been flabbergasted, though. Anybody with any sense of the blue-collar code of etiquette would have known that no civilized working man says ''kicked a little ass'' when referring to a woman.

I doubt that anybody in the Bush family does either, including the Vice President. So what in the world did he have in mind when he went among the hard hats? Determination, pretty clearly, not to act like George Bush.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that George Bush suspects the real George Bush can't get elected, so mustn't be let out for the country to see. The other day in Texas he made a speech attacking Michael Dukakis for going to Harvard. Harvard, he said, was to blame for what he called a ''boutique'' foreign policy, which he ascribed to Mr. Dukakis.

Was he serious? Attacking your opponent for being well educated is an old rube campaign tactic aimed at fetching the know-nothing vote, but to work successfully it has to come from a candidate who majored in corn at the state university. Coming from a Yale man, it is absurd.

Or was he trying to pretend he wasn't one of those snobby, egghead Ivy League types who shop at boutiques instead of the feed and grain store, that he was just a country boy who loved feeling the mud between his toes?

Next day he tried explaining the silliness away by saying Yale was different from Harvard: Yale didn't convey ''the connotation of liberalism and elitism'' that Harvard did. What a muddle. Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirts no matter how hot the weather gets.

In refusing to be George Bush, Bush is like Richard Nixon in the old, old days when a ''new Nixon'' was constantly appearing on the political stump, accompanied by press reports that ''the old Nixon'' had finally been subdued. The ''image'' builder who designed one of those new Nixons was Roger Ailes, who is now working on the Bush campaign.

Maybe this latest Bush disguise is part of an Ailes attempt to create a new Bush: George Bush, barefoot boy from Yale.